About ten years ago I had what I refer to as crazy cancer. A very rare sarcoma in a very rare place that collapsed my spinal column and took away my legs. After i had that managed and learned to walk again it woke me up to the reality of what I was doing with my life. How I was treating people around me. How I was influencing my kids in horribly negative ways.
I was prescribed some antidepressants during the cancer process(not so fun fact, cancer and Cancer treatments most often give patients PTSD. Not the start of my issues but it certainly didn't help.) I wanted to suck the life out of a shotgun barrel. It was probably the closest I have ever been to suicide, though I have been close many times over the years. I'd say this was a full psychotic break for me though I didn't realize it at the time. I could focus on nothing but dying and how to do it with the least trauma to my family. How nieve.
My saving grace. I had a wife, kids and those pills. I can honestly say they are the only things that kept me alive. I had very intense depression in the past. Days, weeks even months where I couldn't do anything. I mostly chocked it up to undiagnosed PTSD because everyone I knew rolling in a bus was fried. This felt like more. It was time to get my shit together.
Eventually I Quit the booze. That was a big one. I had been self medicating with alcohol since I was a very young teenager. I was a full blown functioning alcoholic by 18. Booze was normal where I lived. It was accessible. Most teenagers drank booze without their parents permission or knowledge but they did...and often. Adults got drunk. No big deal. That continued off and on my entire life. Mostly on and mostly full on. Nothing half assed about my addictions.
God it was hard to quit. My wife was also boozing to deal mostly with me but also her own trauma. I just stopped cold turkey. I knew what the consequences could be. I worked as a paramedic for 15 years in a busy city. I saw withdrawal first hand thousands of times. I am not sure how I escaped it but I found the worst part was managing the PTSD symptoms that I had been experiencing and subsequently drowning since I was 18. The nightmares and memories from years of trying to reassemble broken bodies and minds and feeling mostly like a complete failure. Somehow I persevered. Somehow my quitting inspired my wife who also quit a year later. That was quite possibly the hardest year of my life. But I needed it to happen. I needed to be desperate and suffering.
I mean I knew I had problems and lots of them. I knew from a young age. I was always angry at nothing in particular. I frustrated easily. I could spend days straight working in something I was focused on but that wasn't school. I had severe depression and thoughts of suicide regularly. I had extreme highs and lows and I spent my life trying to hide them from everyone and seem normal. That's what I was taught. It's what people did where I lived. No admitting it or seeking help. Just deal with it.
I grew up during a time when mental health problems were more than frowned upon. I didn't say shit to anyone. My mom knew stuff was up but treatment in our rural part of the world was non-existent and knowledge to the broader community would certainly have led to even more intense bullying and trauma and the tag of "Crazy". I just endured. Surely everyone was like this.
Recently I've been helping my kids out with mental health things and in the process have recognised a lot of the behaviors in myself. I always knew something was going on as I have battled anxiety, depression and some type of hyper focus/mania/inability to accomplish my entire life. As a bonus I had heaped on severe PTSD as well.
So now I am looking into me. Focusing on my mental health as part of my addiction recovery and learning how to be a parent. Last week I got the stats. No one will diagnose yet as you need the correct letters behind your name here for that but the test results are more than enough for me to get started on levelling out the symptoms for twb for the first time in my life.
So that's a fun list. Go big or go home I guess. It explains a lot of my life. I'm happy for my kids to have this information so young and the knowledge that they will be able to manage and talk about their symptoms openly. The hardest part for me was managing it all and seeming "normal" to the outside world for so long. I am happy they will experience a much different situation than I did.
I'm on my way to diagnosis and treatment at 50 years old and I am happy.
Having worked in medicine...you do not want doctors policing doctors.